


The Gingerverse

by lizbobjones



Category: Scooby Doo - All Media Types, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ginger, Castiel is Ginger, Episode: s13e16 Scoobynatural, M/M, Scoobynatural - Freeform, hot topic merch (free form), pre-episode coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 17:05:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14000667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: When Dean gets back from the Scooby Doo cartoon, all is not as it seems...





	The Gingerverse

**Author's Note:**

> Probably impenetrably fandom meme nonsense. Uh. [My tumblererer is here.](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/)

The TV in the newly decorated and recently vacated “Dean Cave” rumbled ominously, and with a great shudder spat out Sam, Dean and, finally with a heavy thump, Cas. He sat up in a pile of trenchcoat and grumpy eyebrows, to find Dean staring at him.

Dean’s eyes went from Cas’s face, to his hair, then back to his face, then, once more, inexorably back up to his hair.

Cas had never felt self-conscious in his life until that moment.

“We’re not cartoons anymore,” he said, carefully, wondering what would come of this strange expression that Dean was pointing at him.

“Thank god for that,” Sam said. “I was getting tired of running back and forth making zooming noises.” He waved his arm around experimentally, and with a final puff of purple magic, it made a wobbling noise that faded out like damp whine as the spell broke.

“Cas,” Dean said, slowly. He stopped, though his expression still waved uncertainly like he was on the verge of speaking.

“Yes?” Cas asked.

“Uh… I wasn’t gonna say anything. I thought it was… a… an animation error…”

Cas looked down at his tie, no longer striped, back to normal. “Yes, there were some odd inconsistencies, although your cheekbones were -” He stopped himself from talking.

“No, your hair.”

Sam, who was already heading out the door, no longer interested in their cursed television but in finding the books to research how to stop it ever doing that again with the clues they’d picked up in Scooby Doo, paused and looked back at Dean. “Are you okay?” he asked. He glanced at Cas,who rolled his eyes in Dean’s general direction, indicating that Dean was being ridiculous. Sam shrugged, and left the room.

Dean finally managed to stop wordlessly dithering on the subject. “Have you always been ginger?”

Cas stared at Dean in disbelief.

“My vessel, Jimmy McShane, was ginger…”

“Wa-wait, what? McShane? No, you -”

“I what?”

“He wasn’t called McShane - I mean… Claire… You…”

“I assure you, both Claire and Jimmy have always been called McShane.” Cas opened his phone and scrolled to a picture of himself with his vessel’s daughter, a sulky ginger version of Claire, scowingly freckled-y at Dean from the phone with such a familiar expression despite the genetic differences.

“C-Claire Novak,” Dean said. “She’s blonde. Huge, poofy blonde...” He gestures a waterfall of hair, the same shape as the unruly curls on Cas’s phone screen, but oh so different in his mind’s eye.

“I’ve known her several years, and she has always been red-haired,” Cas said. “As have I.”

Dean ran a hand over his face. “Oh, no, this is too freaky. I can’t even look at you… God, I’m in the wrong universe somehow…”

Cas squinted at him, almost hilariously ready to believe Dean and take him at his word. “What do you think happened?” he asked earnestly.

“I don’t know! Maybe the TV spat me back out into the wrong universe? How does inter-TV-dimensional-cartoon travel happen?”

“Do you require a diagram? It would take some time to explain, but -”

“No, no… it’s, uh, good… Well you still act like my Cas, that’s reassuring.” Dean peered side-eyed at him, as he couldn’t quite bear to face Cas directly. He looked so much like Cas though - same face, same bulky coat and lopsided tie… Same expression directed at him. Carrot top.

Cas ran a hand through his hair, and it bounced back to its usual mussed up shape. Glancing in the dark screen of the now ominously silent television, his reflection looked the same as it always had to his own eyes, though he would give Dean credit for knowing something was wrong.

“Your Cas,” he said carefully. Wondering what this Dean from another dimension might feel for ‘his’ Cas.

“Yeah, the one with the, you know… normal hair.”

“Red hair is perfectly normal, especially for people of Irish heritage,” Cas replied, still baffled about why this was an issue.

“Buddy, I have no idea who ‘Jimmy McShane’ is. Trust me, there’s some real wires crossed, and I need to get back to the tall dark and handsome Cas I know.”

Dean blanched after saying that, seemingly horrified to have admitted this to another version of Cas, so Cas smiled nervously and hoped he was reassuring when he said, “Let’s go tell Sam and we’ll see about getting you home.”

Dean nodded, still gulping wordlessly, and Cas gestured the door.

On the way out, Dean looked once more around his seemingly normal room, just as he had left it - or maybe not. Almost all was as he had left it - Margiekugle sign on the wall, the same lights in his kegger chandeliers… But his lovingly placed wall art of Point of Know Return had become Acoustica by the Scorpions. He raised an eyebrow at gingerverse!Dean, and with an exaggerated shiver, followed who he was forcing himself to think of as Castiel McShane out of the room.

 

*

 

“You… think Cas is ginger?” Sam asked. Suspicious, curious, but mostly baffled. His forehead wrinkled with concern.

“Y-eees?” Dean said, looking from his probably Alternate Universe Non-Ginger Brother to his very much Ginger Angel. “He is, right?”

“Well of course he freakin’ is,” Sam said. “You’ve been calling him ‘Carrot Top’ since the apocalypse.”

“Sounds like me,” Dean said weakly.

Cas looked very smug at Sam’s validation. He was standing at the head of the table. Dean, despite the urgency of this situation, had paused by the kitchen, was pleased to see AU Dean, who was hopefully getting an eyeful of the correct vision of Cas right now, stocked the same beer left in the exact same spot of the fridge as he did, and had opened one, leaving one to the side.

Really, being spat back into an alternate reality where Cas was ginger after spending three days in a Scooby Doo cartoon, he ought to have brought at least three beers, or the hard liquor, but Cas had been scowling at him all the way there and to the library, and AU or not, Dean respected that.

“So…”

“I want to go back into Scooby Doo,” Dean said, with a shudder at having to say that phrase after three days of being chased by poorly animated ghosts and yelling about having to get back to a three dimensional world ASAP. “Not to pick up Daphne or whatever, I just wanna get home.”

“You have a thing for the gingers, huh?” Sam teased.

Dean blinked at him.

The silence stretched on an uncomfortably long time.

Dean took a long drink of his beer to try and forget that comment ever happened.

“So, you think if I just turn the TV back on, I’ll be sucked back in?”

“I mean, I guess? We barely worked out what was up with the curse in the cartoon… I think we have a ton of research to do before we can figure out what spell was used… and none of the books are going to cover what happens when you put the curse on a television.”

“You know, this is stupid. I’m gonna go turn on the TV and see what happens.”

“I don’t think that’s safe… We were extremely lucky to get out of that episode alive.”

“It was Scooby freakin’ Doo, no one dies in Scooby Doo.”

“What if you get dumped into some other show, like Game of Thrones? Would you survive an episode of that?”

Dean scowled at Sam. Sam shrugged innocently.

“Look,” Dean said, glancing back at Cas. He was still ginger. He looked at Sam again hastily. “I just know that something ‘aint right about this universe, and I don’t think I should just sit here and spend the rest of my days having to deal with the fact Cas is now Archie Andrews.”

Sam lifted his hands in defeat. “Okay, we find a way to swap you back for the Dean that only complains about normal things like Doctor Sexy getting cancelled, or -”

“W-what?”

Sam frowned.

Cas instinctively reached for Dean’s shoulder.

“I have got to get out of this universe,” Dean croaked.

 

*

 

Cas and Sam watched Dean muttering and pacing the library, glaring at the books, occasionally pulling one out and reshelving it seemingly at random while grumbling to himself.

“Do you think he’s okay?” Sam asked dubiously. It was a daily thing for something to go wrong in a very strange way in their lives, but this was… unsettling. Dean kept staring at him then suddenly shutting down like he didn’t know Sam.

“It’s a lot to take in, even given our experience with alternate universes,” Cas replied. “He has a different energy signature than our universe. Or the Scooby Doo universe.”

“So you believe him.”

“I believe it is very likely that the method of crossing between them was haphazard enough that it collected a Dean from a universe very like ours where things were happening to us with the same degree of probability, whatever differences we have.”

“And… our Dean is fine.”

“Well. I would assume if he claims there’s no substantial difference between ourselves and our counterparts, we are doing the exact same thing in his universe.” Cas reached up and touched his hair again, the mannerism so unusual that Sam couldn’t help but bite back a smile about how perplexed Cas was at Dean’s reaction.

“Yeah, but maybe our Dean is bitching that this Dean really loves cake instead of pie or something.”

Dean looked over sharply. “Did you say something about pie?”

Sam ran a hand over his face. “Oh boy, this is going to be difficult.”

 

*

 

Dean finally gave the uncannily identical-except-not versions of his family the slip when they got really into reading some nerdy books about interdimensional travel and witches, thinking he was happily distracted with pie. (Bilberry. So he and his AU counterpart did have some more odd little taste quirks to account for.)

He made his way back to the Dean Cave with some relief, almost like this was home - well, he had decorated it all himself, and, slight alterations in decor aside, it still felt like the place he had just spent a few days messing around with, fine tuning to his tastes.

The foosball table was the wrong way around.

He sank down in one of the chairs, and stared at the television. The remote lay innocently on the table between them.

“Dean.”

He looked up, and saw Cas in the doorway. Still ginger. He looked away, biting back a smile. There was something increasingly endearing about it, and he sort of wished he could sneak the photo of Cas and Claire back home to show them. Claire would hate it. His Cas would be about as baffled as this one was about why this was even weird.

“I wasn’t running away,” he lied.

Cas came into the room, and stood awkwardly by the chairs for a moment, before settling into the other. “You’re in my chair.”

“Wow, you’re pushy about that in this world.”

Cas squinted. “You told me that was my chair and made a huge production out of it. Did you give this chair to the other Castiel instead?”

Dean swallowed. “N-no. I…” He’d thought about it - known Sam thought the concept of the whole room was silly and he’d treat being given a space here with raised eyebrows and a smirk, while Cas would be genuinely touched. Would want to come watch Dean’s silly cowboy movies or whatever he asked without complaining. Sam could steal Cas’s chair when there was a game they wanted to catch, of course, but… the sense of ownership wasn’t the same. He’d been imagining a space for them all, but maybe something to make Cas stay and that meant hoping he began to see that chair as his own…

“Hey, um, Cas, can you do me a favour?”

“Of course.”

“Send me that pic of you and Claire… I know she’d get a kick out of it. Well, no, she’d probably think it was some dumb Photosnap filter, and…”

“Snapchat? Or is it called that in your universe?”

Dean pouted. “No. Anyway, point is, she’s been through a tough time lately, and…”

“Kaia?”

Dean nodded. “All these alternate dimensions… And somehow everything seems the same.”

Cas, who had been messing with his phone, held it up to show the picture sending.

“If your number is the same, then…”

“Wait. Wait wait wait, what’s that?”

“What?” Cas turned his phone to look at it.

“T-the freaking lovehearts in the last text you sent gingerverse!me!”

Cas looked over his phone at Dean, confused, hair gently reflecting the mood lighting of the room in a dark maroon halo around his head that messed with Dean nearly as much as the text messages.

“You were wishing me a safe trip back from the airport.”

“C-Cas, what the hell is going on? I don’t text emojis full stop, let alone…”

“Oh. In your world, did we not… hook up… on my return from spending three weeks in Asmodeus’s prison?”

“No! No we freakin’ didn’t!” Dean grabs the TV remote almost as a weapon of defence.

“I suppose we have been proceeding at a slightly different pace in this universe. I apologise you found out before you were ready.”

“Ready?!”

Cas looked more annoyed than anything. “Maybe in your reality I have dark hair and you’re heterosexual.”

Dean groaned and put his head in his hands.

After a way too long awkward silence, Cas got up. “I’m sorry… I’ll… go see how Sam’s research is coming along.” He strode out of the room. Dean stared after him, still not used to the back of his head being such a glossy red.

Stunned stupid, Dean pointed the remote at the TV, and hit the on button.

A beam of purple light shot out and hit him.

“Not again!” he yelled, as it sucked him into the TV.

 

*

 

There was a whole thing with a haunted-but-not-so-haunted funfair. Fred was delighted to see his new friend again. Dean rode a rollercoaster with Scooby and Shaggy. He wished the DVR would record it. It was, as distractions go, top tier. He just wished the evil clown villain was there when Sam was in the TV with them.

He gave Daphne a wide berth and Velma kept trying to make him talk about his feelings until he distracted her with clues to solving the mystery.

Thankfully, Scooby Doo episodes are short, and having learned how to escape the TV once before, it wasn’t long at all before Dean was spat back out into another, almost identical Dean Cave to the one he left.

But with the all-important Kansas album on the wall where it was supposed to be.

He picked up the remote from the floor, where apparently another version of himself had dropped it, hopefully sucked back to the ginger!verse where he belonged. Dean self-consciously straightened the chair he’d knocked back on his return - “Cas”’s chair, he supposed.

He should have just got a sofa, he thought.

If this universe was running anything like the one he just left, Sam would be researching in the library.

And Cas would be there…

His Cas.

The one, apparently, he was a few weeks behind his counterpart in hooking up with. Was this really what did it for them? A cursed TV and Velma from Scooby Doo patting him on the elbow and telling him not to be afraid to follow the clues his heart found?

It was terrifying.

It was…

He came through the door to the war room, looking up at the library tables.

“I’m back,” he announced, assuming that he really was mostly on hope.

Cas looked over at once, and smiled - no, laughed to himself. Sam startled a little from his book at the sound and looked up too, and his laugh was out loud until Cas couldn’t help but join in.

“What?” Dean demanded, stomping up the steps to join them.

In the balmy light of the library lamps, Cas’s hair was a normal, wonderful darkish brown again.

And he was laughing at Dean.

Sam finally wiped his eyes and managed to say, “We like you better when you’re ginger.”


End file.
